The Court is confronted with a difficult task: it has to pay Peter without robbing Paul. The sentence is an unsuccessful attempt at solving the unsolvable problem.

It will be up to the future proletarian dictatorship in Germany to find and sentence the real culprits and the persons behind the scenes - 'Mephistopheles.'

The Chief Prosecutor found himself in the position of a mother who has had a miscarriage.

Why a 'miscarriage'?

Because to formally pronounce Communism as guilty, after all disclosures before the Court to the contrary, actually is tantamount to an indirect admission that the National Socialists are guilty!

If van der Lubbe had had accomplices and if these were neither Torgler nor the other accused persons, then what?...

The question then comes up: Why, in the course of five months of preliminary inquest and three months of Court sessions, were the real accomplices not discovered?

And what is more, these accomplices must have been 'insiders', i.e. persons familiar with the distribution and inside structure of the Reichstag. Otherwise van der Lubbe could not have perpetrated the fire; but who, apart from the National Socialists, could have known these things at that time?

Who could, at a time when the Communists were under strict observation and persecuted, calmly and unhindered enter and leave the Reichstag?

And then:

Hennigsdorf - the asylum? Other asylums, The young man in Spandau?

The unknown civilian?

The National Socialist deputy Dr. Albrecht?

The legend about the conversation in Neuköln?

The police interrogation of van der Lubbe without a Dutch translator?

Karwahne, Frey, Kroyer, Weberstedt, Droescher, Hellmer?

Kämpfer, Kunzak, Lebermann, Grohte?

An appeal? A signal? But what for?

For a 'national revolution', for an extermination campaign against the workers' movement and the German Communist Party.

For the establishment of a 'totalitarian state', of National Socialist 'total power'!

'High treason'? No!

High treason against the people, i. e. betrayal of the German people!

Fascist dictatorship - the dictatorship of capital: Thyssen and Krupp!

December 23, 1933

Notes

1)
Georgi Dimitrov's heroic struggle at the trial and the powerful campaign of anti-fascist solidarity with which was developed abroad, exposed the nazi incendaries of the Reichstag and saved the life of the inniocent defendants

On December 23 the Leipzig court aquitted the three Bulgarians and Torgler for 'lack of evidence'. The nazi tool, van der Lubbe, was sentenced to death.

The nazis trying to save face, formulated the sentence in a such manner as to lay the blame for the Reichstag fire on the German Communist Party, insinuating that the culprits should be sought within its ranks.

Georgi Dimitrov dealt a telling blow at this manouvre. After the announcement of the sentence and the Court President's speech, he asked for the floor. Upset by this new speech, which threatened to further expose naziosm, the panic-stricken President gathered his papers and, without uttering a word, hastened out of the courtroom.